mth: perhaps it makes sense to revert the RNDIS commit, since it doesn't work anyway (giving people a chance to use the CDC driver on Windows). Also, qi_lb60_defconfig should be changed to add DEVTMPFS support, otherwise it freezes at boot

roh: seems that there are two main directions: form printing and heavy duty printing. the former (i love puns :) is the one most likely to yield devices affordable to "the masses". the heavy duty stuff is a lot more difficult.

paul_boddie: on the other side... the hackers world may have shortcomings, but there is also niceness... the openness, the sharing of knowledge.. the 'unconventional' or 'unorthodox' concepts being tried and results being published (sometimes) simply is more fun

also i realized that there seems to be more 'konservative' engineering in opensource. if stuff is figured out to a certain degree of reliability, it seldomly changes without need. but till then there is much more creativity than in what ive seen of the 'old world'

I think it's important that knowledge be documented in such a way that an endeavour can be repeated. Some people don't like that because it threatens their position - they need their "secret sauce" - and others insist that patents achieve this, which is a complete joke, but the people who deal with obsolete systems have plenty of lessons to teach people about this kind of thing, and I don't think society will always be able to afford to ignore t

People have no sense of history, that's why. It's part of a more general depressing phenomenon where you can end up arguing with someone about something that probably happened before they were born, and they have the nerve to doubt that any such thing ever happened.

It's like all those people who don't think that Microsoft ever did anything wrong. Clearly they were born fairly recently and never caught up, or they never bothered to pay attention during, say, the 1990s.

whitequark: Did you ever do anything a while ago and then see someone much more recently announce something very similar as the hot new thing? People are just lazy but want their fame and glory anyway.

which doesn't mean they ever did something wrong. Both Algol and Lisp have proven to be unusable by general public. Iterating their useful features in this fashion allows us to have better and better languages

About Microsoft, yes, they never stopped, but people either have the view that all the major legal trouble in the 1990s was unmerited (or didn't happen because they never knew about it) and so there's no *real* dirt, or that Microsoft is a changed company. MS is just better at covering their tracks these days, although still incompetent at that, of course.

I can see that, actually. Concepts like functions were probably like everything else: a tradeoff that worked for certain use-cases, but would they work satisfactorily in general, and is it wise to eliminate support for the other cases?

I think closures are a luxury, myself. You can model what you need from them in other ways, and they cause complications for the language designer and implementer. The Lisp crowd lobbied hard for closures in Python, and I don't really think that the resulting support is worth having.

Although those functions probably still have some notion of a name, they don't need to be available through that name any more. You can make lists of parameterised functions all of which probably think they have a name, but it's irrelevant.

Well, I use a variety of constructs that different groups of other Python programmers frown upon in different ways, but I think that some of these syntax refinements work against their own motivations.

In fact, you're not wrong to point out that the naming of things in Python is a potential conceptual hurdle for people if only because languages like Java special-case things like methods. This can lead to flaws in people's reasoning about the behaviour of programs, even to the extent of how one should refer to and reason about program units.

Personally, I think that you have two different schools of thought where one school prizes closures and the other says, "Well we can more or less do that more cleanly with structures/objects/explicit state." The former group taunts the latter because they've been writing Lisp since forever, and the latter probably uses languages where closures would add complexity to their implementation that they wouldn't be able to live with.

What you wrote on your blog looked a lot like what someone wrote for Python, but that was more about evaluating the program expressions (the guy didn't say exactly how he did it), and then producing a simplified program. But I guess the two ideas are equivalent as he could easily have been describing a simplified generated program.